Hot, cold, dry, wet: a bounty of extreme

We should be discussing how best to prepare ourselves, we should not be wasting resources fighting a battle – greenhouse gas reduction - we can’t win.

Over the last few months we have been witness to many extreme weather events - heat waves, Europe suffering from a severe cold snap, the worst in twenty five years, extreme flooding in Australia, Brazil and China, to drought in the U.S. Many say the cause is global warming, and lay the blame squarely on greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity.

Are we, and our activities at fault? What can we look forward to if/as the earth continues to warm?

Cause

The Earth's climate has been continuously changing throughout its history. From ice covering large amounts of the globe to interglacial periods where there was ice only at the poles - our climate and biosphere has been in flux for millennia.

This temporary reprieve from the ice we are now experiencing is called an interglacial period - the respite from the cold locker began 18,000 years ago as the earth started heating up and warming its way out of the Pleistocene Ice Age.

These interglacial periods usually last somewhere between 15,000 to 20,000 years before another ice age starts. Presently we’re at year 18,000 of the current warm spell.

Serbian astrophysicist Milutin Milankovitch is best known for developing one of the most significant theories relating to Earths motions and long term climate change.

Milankovitch developed a mathematical theory of climate change based on the seasonal and latitudinal variations in the solar radiation received by the Earth from our Sun - it was the first.